When you diet and begin to lose a few pounds, most of this is water weight. It varies with each individual but once you lose over 7 pounds your body begins to panic and immediately thinks "prepare for famine" - in a sense it goes into 'starvation mode'. You must remember that the bodies primary goal is survival, nothing else, so losing weight and losing water worries the body and it will begin to retain everything it can from both food and drink to avoid losing any mroe weight. This is why a lot of dieters lose the first 7 - 10 pounds and then their weight loss stalls. This is the phase where the body is retaining everything it can for survival.
How do we get around this? Basically you need to reassure the body, give it as much water as possible to tell it that there is nothing to worry about. This stall in weight loss could last up to week (again varies with each individual) but its perfectly natural, its the bodies way of adjusting to your new weight, it needs to reassure itself that it is getting enough water and to reassure it that it isn't heading for starvation. Drinking water through this will reassure the body.
How much water should I drink? As a general rule of thumb we should try to drink around 8 glasses of water a day, some say 2 litres a day. The problem is most people find water boring, and lets be honest - it is! It doesn't taste of anything but it is vital for good health so we need to find ways of sneaking it into our daily routine without noticing.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have a pattern in your daily routine of when you drink?
- Do you always have a coffee when you get up?
- Do you always have a drink with your meals?
- Do you always have a drink before you go to bed?
If you answer yes to any of these you can easily substitute some of these drinks for a glass of water. For example; have glass when you wake up, have a glass when you go to bed and one with your lunch. Are any of you drinks fruit juice, or diluted quash? Change these for water, you will find as time goes on you will be drinking it without noticing. Set yourself a target of 4 glasses a day and promise yourself you will have these 4 glasses for a week at least, at the end of the week increase your intake to 5 glasses a day. Build it up slowly, sneak it into your daily routine and you will feel better for it.
I read an interesting post in a forum the other day. A young girl (in her twenties) had lost a stone in her first month of dieting, she continued this for 3 months and lost a further stone. During this time she was eating a low sugar and low carb diet, she had substituted all her diet cola drink for water during this time and just had a few mugs of coffee a day - all was going well. A week into the fourth month of her diet she continued to eat the same foods in the same quantities but increased her intake of diet cola to 10 cans a day! This was the same amount that she used to drink before dieting. In the two weeks that followed she put on 7 pounds!!! The body was shocked into not getting its usual healthy intake of water so again began to retain what it could. I would like to see what would have happened if she continued to drink the same water - my guess is that her weight would have remained the same.
